ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY But there was more to the Pentagon's frustration than that. "The targeting data was weak," one intelligence adviser told me. "The coupling between the targets we were trying to hit and bin Laden's activities was very remote." Furthermore, said the adviser, who was informally briefed on the missions after they took place, Tomahawk missiles, which are armed with a small payload of high ex- plosives, were unlikely to succeed in kill- ing bin Laden and his cohorts in their well-fortified caves and bunkers in M- ghanistan. "It's a schlock target," the ad- viser said. The four-star general agreed, in a sub- sequent interview. "When you elect to use force in the Third World, you're judged not by a legal system but by a very so- phisticated enemy that doesn't believe you anyway," the general said. "When the strong attack the weak, the weak win." He and his colleagues, the general added, would have argued against the use of Tomahawk missiles, because there's no evidence that such bombings have any significant impact on terrorists. "In today's world, we have very sophisticated adver- saries, and to deal with them we have to understand their decision sequence. We have to understand how they make deci- sions, who influences them." International terrorists, the general told me, "are more sophisticated than our intelligence is ca- pable of dealing with. "If- you do elect to attack them," the general added, it should be done, after careful analysis, at a point of leverage--"a collapse point. What means to an end do I use? Clearly, in some cases, something nonpublic and non-kinetic. Banking, for example. It's not something to do on a weekend in Marthàs Vineyard." In the aftermath of the truck bomb- ings in Kenya and Tanzania, the general said, "and with a wounded President, there are large pressures on the system. So who's in the room? Clearly not the uni- formed military." The general concluded, "This is classic Sandy Berger." The gen- eral's point was that he and other senior officers believe that Berger and Madeleine Albright are too quick to advocate force as a solution to diplomatic problems. "Madeleine is willing to fire a missile at anybod " the general added, with a laugh. Some officials in the White House and the State Department, in conversa- tions with me, dismissed the complaints as the usual griping of bureaucrats who were not included in the planning for the strikes. And one military officer who worked under Berger on the Nahonal Se- curity Council defended him. "The de- mand for results in the Office of the Pres- idency are impossible," the officer said. "There is an expectation that the execu- tive is on top of everything and has an- swers to all foreign-policy crises. There is no other accountable agency-certainly not Congress." The National Security Council must rely on "secrecy and dis- patch," the officer said, to get things done. "For the first time, the White House is treating terrorism as a national-security problem, and not as a law-enforcement problem," the officer added. ' erica has joined the battle. If there is group think" among the President's advisers, in terms of wanting the missile strike, "there also is group think on the opposition"-people in the Pentagon and State Department, who invariably find reasons to say no. "The answer is you have to trust our judgment," the officer said. It is, however, precisely that issue--the White House's judgment-that has been so troublesome for the intelligence com- munity and the armed forces. One former top Pentagon official told me of a recent White House meeting with Berger and his aides to discuss a soon-to-be-released government re- port on a significant national-security issue. 'M they wanted to know was how it was going to affect a [congressional] vote in three days," the former official said. "Nobody in that White House wants to hear bad news." The President, he added, doesn't have a national- security polic "It's all ad hoc. All off the shelf. Decisions are random. Suddenly, this one time he has to move fast." Many current and former officials noted that the Presi- dent had refrained from a mili- tary response in 1996, when /- nineteen American airmen were slain in the bombing of the Khobar Towers bar- racks in Saudi Arabia. A review of the President's numerous public statements and speeches on terrorism and its impli- cations reveals that Clinton has consis- te dy stressed the need for improved law enforcemen t, urging in a radio address shortly after the Saudi bombing that more international effort be made to share information and prosecute sus- pected terrorists. One intelligence analyst told me, articulating a commonly held 37 view, "Sometimes the hardest thing to say is that there's no way to respond which will not make things worse." But, the an- alyst added, "this President is in trouble with public opinion. He has to do some- thing Presidential. To do nothing or to wait requires political strength-and a weakened President thinks he can't get away with it." For this analyst and others, the bu- reaucratic anger focussed on Sandy Berger is misplaced. Berger is known through- out the government for his loyalty to the President and, until the Monica Lewin- sky crisis erupted, in Janu was widely expected to replace Erskine Bowles as White House chief of staff: If Berger was, as many in the government believe, rushing to judgment in order to hurl Tomahawk missiles, he was doing pre- cisely what Bill Clinton wanted. P RESIDENT CLINTON has had a trou- bled relationship with the F.B.I. and Louis Freeh, whom Clinton nominated as director in 1993. Relations between the White House and the bureau worsened over the summer, when a Republican sen- ator made public sections of a letter from Freeh accusing Attorney General Reno of misreading the law by not seeking an independent counsel to investigate the Clinton reëlection campaign's fund- raIsing practices in 1996. F reeh and many of his top aides believe that the E B.I. was excluded from White House delibera- tions on military retaliation because Clinton questions his political loyalty. With the recent concern over terrorism, the F. B.L has established new outposts and augmented old ones around the world. Mter the embassy bombings, Freeh flew to Mrica to oversee the EB.I.'s manhunt for the terrorists. By August ,. 20th, more than four hundred F.B.I. agents were scattered throughout eastern Mrica, beginning a process that would lead to several arrests. Senior F.B.I. officials have told me that Freeh and his top leadership were not consulted or given what they considered to be ade- quate advance notification of the missile attack, which could have brought re- prisals-especially if bin Laden had been killed. One senior official also noted a suspicion, widely prevalent inside the bu- reau, that there was "no concern" in the White House for the director's personal